Washington special interest groups — notorious for their
anti-religious hostility toward conservatives — are conducting a
coordinated smear campaign against Scott Bloch, George Bush’s
appointee to the Office of Special Counsel (OSC), which reviews and
refers whistleblower disclosures to agency heads. In an interview
with TAS, Pete Leon, legislative director for Rep. Eliot
Engel (D-N.Y.), who has called for Bloch’s resignation, revealed
the fundamental anti-religious bigotry at the heart of the
campaign. Articulating his objections to Bloch, Leon said, “He is a
devout Catholic,” then quickly added, after he realized his gaffe,
the famously insincere line from Seinfeld, “Not that
there’s anything wrong with that.”
Yes, there is something wrong with having a devout Catholic in
this government office, according to the groups attacking Bloch.
Look behind the rhetoric against Bloch and it becomes apparent that
these groups do not consider a believing Catholic a worthy head of
an office that they had used as a battering ram for liberal causes
under Bill Clinton. Sworn in as United States Special Counsel in
January 2004, Scott Bloch has angered these entrenched interest
groups not because he hasn’t been doing his job but because he has
been doing it too well.
Entering the job he faced a backlog of over a thousand cases.
Whistleblower disclosures and prohibited personnel practice
complaints, as old as three years, gathered dust in the federal
bureaucracy while legitimate problems went unchecked. In 15 months,
Bloch, displaying a healthy contempt for a D.C. ethos of
business-as-usual bureaucracy, nearly eliminated that backlog, and
has undone some of the damage that spread under Clinton’s
appointee.
Charged by the President with reforming the OSC, Bloch aimed to
process the case backlog in a year and his staff produced. “I made
it clear we wouldn’t allow claims to languish any longer,” Bloch
said Tuesday. In 2004, the overall case backlog was reduced by 82
percent, from 1,121 to 201 cases, according to the OSC. Of those,
the whistleblower disclosure backlog was reduced from 674 to 82
cases and prohibited personnel practices (PPP) from 447 to 119.
For this, Bloch’s detractors charge him with allowing
discrimination against homosexuals, improper hiring practices, an
office “purge,” and a disregard for the cases brought before his
office. Jeff Ruch, executive director of Public Employees for
Environmental Responsibility (PEER), has called him “a maniac
overseeing the asylum.”
THE MAINSTREAM MEDIA, helping PEER attack Bloch through a steady
stream of credulous stories, fails to note PEER’s regular campaigns
against religion and the religious in government. A whole section
of PEER’s webpage derides the National Parks under President Bush
as “Faith-Based Parks.” PEER board member Frank Buono sued in 2003
for the removal of a cross in Mojave National Preserve that he
found “offensive.” PEER has protested the Grand Canyon National
Park bookstore for carrying a book that suggests God created the
earth.
The campaign to bork Bloch — PEER has worked with Ralph Neas at
People for the American Way, which savaged Robert Bork in 1987 —
began when Bloch shook up the bureaucracy, reorganizing his office
this January after a yearlong review. Bloch reassigned 12 career
employees, including seven to a new Detroit field office. The
career employees were not given a choice, which is a common and
legal federal practice.
Federal unions quickly complained to Congress about Bloch, as
did whistleblower groups such as PEER, accusing him of retaliation
and discrimination. House Democrats wrote Bloch in late January,
questioning the transfers and other hiring. Homosexual activists
also targeted Bloch. The Washington Blade reported that
two of the reassigned employees are gay and claim to be victims of
discrimination.
Bloch says these transferred employees hadn’t expressed any
disagreement, and he was unaware that any of the employees were
homosexual.
What really upsets the homosexual activist groups is not that
these two employees were reassigned but that Bloch ended the
propagandistic use of the OSC’s website by Bill Clinton’s openly
lesbian appointee Elaine Kaplan. When Bloch took office, parts of
the OSC website cited sexual orientation as a protected status.
Bloch discovered that executive orders by President Clinton had
improperly extended OSC’s jurisdiction over sexual orientation
discrimination claims. Bloch concluded that the law, 5 U.S.C.
§ 2302 (b)(10), prohibits discrimination on the basis of
conduct that does not adversely affect job performance, and that
orientation is not included as a class status in case law,
legislative history, or the plain meaning of the law.
The Human Rights Campaign, homosexual newspapers, Congressmen
Barney Frank, Engel, and others protested the move. Engel called
for Bloch’s resignation last October. The congressmen, joined by
three others in the House, requested clarification from Bloch on
the matter as late as last month.
Grabbing for any available stick, the special interest groups
are now accusing Bloch of dismissing the backlog of frivolous
complaints without adequate review. PEER’s Ruch has repeatedly
claimed that Bloch “appears to have taken action in very few… of
these cases and has yet to represent a single whistleblower in an
employment case.” This is false. Under Bloch, according to official
records, OSC increased legitimate referrals to agency heads from 14
in 2003 to 26 in 2004. Also, OSC referred 22 percent more PPPs for
internal investigation during the backlog period.
“We’re finding more wheat in the chaff,” Bloch said. Further,
according to OSC, about 500 backlogged cases were low priority and
already slated for closure by Bloch’s predecessor.
Bloch pointed to several cases in which OSC has referred
disclosures. Among them were disclosures involving air traffic
control problems, danger posed to nuclear facilities, engines
wrongly mounted on Air Force transport planes, and uncertified work
on Navy ships. In February, OSC announced that it protected a TSA
employee who was fired after blowing the whistle on a supervisor
who had brought his assault rifle into the airport.
PRESSED FOR EVIDENCE of Bloch’s malfeasance, Ruch offers little
save suspicion. “We don’t know at the end of the day how many
whistleblowers have been helped,” Ruch said. “A lot of this
controversy would end if they came up with a couple examples.”
Then Ruch got to the nub of his complaints, saying that Bloch is
“trying to make the office into a center of like-minded movement
conservatives.” Even if this were true, is that a crime? Does Ruch
expect Bush’s appointee to hire people who will thwart him?
PEER repeatedly cites as an example of Bloch’s “cronyism” his
temporary hire of Alan Hicks. According to OSC spokeswoman Cathy
Deeds, Hicks, the former headmaster of Bloch’s son’s school, was
hired as a trusted advisor with management and other experience. A
temporary hire paid less than $7,000 for 120 hours of work, Hicks
assisted Bloch with the agency review. Under 5 U.S.C. § 3109,
intermittent experts or consultants are not required to be hired
competitively.
By “cronies,” PEER means Catholics. PEER’s problem with Bloch is
not that he has hired people he knows, but that he has hired
Catholics he knows. Last Monday, PEER’s press release made sure to
mention that Hicks oversaw a Catholic boarding school. Its
Nov. 17, 2004 press release smeared Hicks by suggesting he was
complicit in the Scranton, Pennsylvania, diocese’s sexual abuse
scandal. He had nothing to do with it. In that release, Ruch,
citing a popular anti-Catholic book, said, “Scott Bloch’s personnel
practices are taken straight from The DaVinci Code rather
than the civil service manual.”
The PEER press release also said Bloch “is a religious
conservative who had served as deputy director in the Justice
Department’s Office of Faith-Based Initiatives.” PEER cited Bloch’s
hires of graduates from “ultra-conservative” Ave Maria Law School
as Schedule A attorneys, who can be hired non-competitively,
ignoring that he has also hired attorneys from George Washington,
Georgetown, and the University of Virginia. And what exactly is
Ruch’s objection to Ave Maria? It is an accredited law school in
Ann Arbor, Michigan, and its first class of graduates performed
better on the bar exam than any other Michigan school. Are
graduates there prohibited from government service in his view?
Bloch’s predecessor Elaine Kaplan hired her labor union friends.
Did Ruch object to that? Cary P. Sklar, who served as an associate
special counsel under Kaplan at OSC, also worked for her during her
last tenure at the National Treasury Employees Union, to which she
has since returned.
Religious faith is a punch line to Bloch’s critics: Ruch told
the Bob Garfield radio show last month, “Mr. Bloch used to be the
deputy director of the Justice Department Office of Faith Based
Initiatives, and so we’re telling whistleblowers that you better
have faith…” He laughed as he said this.
Bloch’s troubles from these groups may only increase in the
coming months, especially if conservatives do not expose the left’s
anti-Catholic campaign here for what it is. A GAO spokesman
confirmed Tuesday that his agency is auditing the OSC, at the
behest of Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) and Rep. Danny Davis
(D-Ill.). He could not disclose the audit’s scope. The Senate
Committee on Government Affairs plans hearings into OSC this
spring.
“Perhaps I’m unconventional in my methods,” says Bloch. “But I’m
not beholden to bureaucratic diplomacy. That’s not something I want
to understand.” And contact with his son L. Cpl. Michael Bloch, 21,
the oldest of seven, who just returned from his second tour in
Iraq, keeps him “grounded in the mission of the agency.”
